Screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at the last Cannes Film Festival, Pamfir’s Oath, in theaters Wednesday, November 2, comes out of the canons of Western cinema. The first feature film by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk recalls this other director with a name that is difficult to remember, the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, of whom he could be a Slavic equivalent. Magical.
In the heart of rural Ukraine, Pamfir finds his wife and son in an isolated region on the border with Romania. He swore to leave the traffics and his bad life behind. When her boy, on a whim, sets fire to the local church. Pamfir is forced to pay the reconstruction costs. He is then tempted to reconnect with the troubled past he has just abandoned.
Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk has in common with Apichatpong Weerasethakul the rooting in an animist, religious nature. Under the pretext of preparations for a carnival, Pamfir consults the shamans and performs ceremonies which cleanse him of his past life. The return to the family bosom is also one with a nurturing environment. But the penitent will be upset by the act of his son and the reparation he wants to assume. Forced to reconnect with the national sport practiced at the border – smuggling – it is the sacrifice for his son, at the risk of his life, which will allow him to redeem himself.
Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s project is to bring a Ukrainian singularity to the screen. The religion is a mixture of orthodoxy and paganism which lasted long after Christianization in the West. Time seems to have stopped in this wooded and rocky nature. Smuggling is a reflection of corruption, reputedly widespread in Ukraine, and hinders its accession to the European Union. Pamfir’s quest for redemption could be the one Ukraine is looking for. But today, the war is changing the situation.
Pamfir’s Oath allows you to touch a country about which we had little news, today in the spotlight following the Russian invasion. The creativity of Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s first feature film recalls, apart from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nikita Mikhalkov (Urga) and Sergei Paradjanov (The Horses of Fire). The same care given to the image and to the quasi-ethnological treatment of the subject brings them together, with an atavistic, poetic spiritual note.
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Gender : Drama
Director: Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk
Actors: Oleksandr Yatsentyuk, Stanislav Potyak, Solomiya Kyrylova
Country : Poland / Chile / Ukraine / France
Duration : 1h42
Exit : November 2, 2022
Distributer : CondorCast
Warning: scenes, comments or images may offend the sensibilities of viewers
Summary: In a rural region on the borders of Ukraine, Pamfir, a true force of nature, reunites with a wife and child after long months of absence. When her son is involved in an arson, Pamfir is forced to repair the damage. But faced with the sums at stake, he has no choice but to reconnect with his troubled past. At the risk of losing everything.